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network, noun: 1. An openwork fabric or structure in which cords, threads, or wires cross at regular intervals.

— American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition

What This Site Is About

Welcome to DiscoverTheNetworks, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This website is a “Guide to the Political Left.” It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left, and also the institutions that fund and sustain the left; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left’s (often hidden) programmatic agendas; and it provides an understanding of the left’s history and ideas.

The site is made up of two principal data elements along with a powerful search engine to locate and explore the information stored. The first of these elements is a database of PROFILES of individuals, organizations, and institutions. The PROFILES provide thumbnail sketches of histories, agendas, and (where significant) funding sources. The information has been culled from public records readily available on the Internet and in books and other sources whose veracity and authenticity are easily checked.

The second data element of this site consists of a library of articles, both scholarly and journalistic, which analyze the relationships disclosed in the database and the issues they raise. These articles have been entered into the database and linked at the bottom of the PROFILE pages. The judgments that inform these analyses are subjective, reflecting informed opinion about the matters at hand. In every case possible, their authors and sources are identified so that users of the database can form their own judgments and opinions about the reliability and value of the analyses.

DiscoverTheNetworks is an ambitious undertaking that would not have been possible before the creation of the Internet, with the storage capacities and data linkage features that digital space affords and that such an undertaking requires. As a result of the information that these technologies make available, a user of this site can follow the networks described in the database to arrive at a new understanding of the forces that define our social reality and shape our collective futures.

The database will readily answer many questions that previously would have required volumes of printed text to establish. The primary question is: “Is there a left?” Since the early 1970s, radical activists began referring to themselves as “liberals” (in part to distance themselves from their failures as a socialist left). A sympathetic media culture went along with this deception, with the result that the word “left” has all but disappeared from the political lexicon. The spectrum of views is now regularly described in the media culture as extending from “liberal” to “moderate” to “conservative” or “right,” as though a left did not exist or was so marginal as not to matter.

By browsing this database, and familiarizing oneself with the agendas of the individuals and organizations it contains, with the scope of their activities, and with the countless millions of dollars available to support them, a user of this base will find ample evidence for the existence of this left and for the fact that it is a major player in the political destinies of the nation.

As we are committed to minimizing the possibility of any inaccuracies creeping into our database, we have provided a contact link on the homepage of this site (CONTRIBUTE INFORMATION) where corrections can be submitted. We will take immediate steps to correct any factual inaccuracies that are brought to our attention.

Other concerns are certain to be raised that we will not regard as legitimate but rather as veiled expressions of distress over the factual information revealed on the site. Such responses reflect an anti-intellectual attitude that seeks to embargo the political debate before it takes place.

Every effort has been made in the creation of DiscoverTheNetworks to avoid conflating subjective judgments about policy differences with factual descriptions of attitudes expressed by the individuals and organizations listed on this site. Individuals and organizations identified as “Marxist” or “socialist,” or as having agendas sympathetic to America’s adversaries, are so identified on the basis of their explicit, and self-stated, commitment to these agendas. Their profiles are generally linked to analytic articles whose authors and sources are clearly identified.

DiscoverTheNetworks is not by intent or design or consequence a “snitch file,” as the former lieutenant governor of Colorado absurdly proposed. To whom would the site be snitching, and about what criminal activity? Is the lieutenant governor implying that the leftists identified in this site are hiding something that should not be submitted to public scrutiny? Is she aware of some governmental authority with an official list of forbidden viewpoints ready to impose penalties on the subjects in this base for having offensive ideas?

The purpose of the DiscoverTheNetworks site is not to stifle free speech but to clarify it. We recognize that people are not always candid in what they say in public life, particularly in the arena of political discourse. “Truth in political advertising” would be a more accurate description of our intentions in assembling this data.

The problem of deceptive public presentation is common enough to all sides in the political debate but applies with special force to the left, which has a long and well-documented history of dissembling about its agendas. In the past, for example, the Communist Party operated through “front” groups that concealed the radical agendas of those who controlled them. In the 1948 elections, the Party created an entire electoral front — the Progressive Party — to run a candidate in Henry Wallace who opposed the Cold War against Stalin. During the congressional investigations into the covert activities of the Communist Party, its leaders appeared before government panels to proclaim their patriotism and to describe themselves as avid defenders of free speech, denying that they had any radical agendas at all. In fact the Communist Party was an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the American political system, the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, and the elimination of free speech for those whom it regarded as the “class enemy.”

The disingenuous tradition of the political left has continued into the present. In the 1960s, for instance, the radical organizers of the mass anti-war demonstrations pretended that their only interest was to “Bring the Troops Home,” when in fact their agendas embraced a radical menu that was anti-capitalist and welcomed a Communist victory. In the campaign against the war in Iraq, a similar pattern emerged, as the information provided in this database clearly demonstrates. In this realm and many others, DiscoverTheNetworks lays bare the connections that tie today’s left to the left of ages past.

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